With development of technologies such as an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) transmission technology and a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO, Multiple User-MIMO) transmission technology, currently, a communications system can already support multi-user transmission, that is, support multiple stations in simultaneously sending and receiving data.
However, for how to perform resource scheduling for multiple users in the foregoing multi-user transmission (for example, including an OFDMA mode, a MU-MIMO mode, or an OFDMA and MU-MIMO hybrid transmission mode), a solution needs to be provided.
According to a currently known resource scheduling solution, a bit sequence is to indicate resource units in a bandwidth to be allocated, that is, one bit in the bit sequence indicates allocation of one resource subunit (one resource subunit includes 1×26 subcarriers), and switching between 0 and 1 in the bit sequence indicates that a resource unit indicated by a bit before the switching and a resource unit indicated by a bit after the switching are allocated to different users.
For example, when a bandwidth to be allocated is 20 megahertz (MHz), nine resource subunits are included, and a bit sequence of nine bits needs to be to indicate resource allocation. Moreover, as the bandwidth increases, a length of the bit sequence also increases continuously, that is, in the resource scheduling solution of the prior art, a large quantity of transmission resources need to be occupied to transmit the bit sequence.
Therefore, it is hoped that a technology that can support reduction of transmission resource overheads in resource scheduling is provided.